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The study aims to identify and analyse the drivers of resilient healthcare supply chain (HCSC) preparedness in emergency health outbreaks to prevent disruption in healthcare services delivery in the context of India.

The present study has opted for the grey clustering method to identify and analyse the drivers of resilient HCSC preparedness during health outbreaks into high, moderate and low important grey classes based on Grey-Delphi, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Shannon's information entropy (IE) theory.

The drivers of the resilient HCSC are scrutinised using the Grey-Delphi technique. By implementing AHP and Shannon's IE theory and depending upon structure, process and outcome measures of HCSC, eleven drivers of a resilient HCSC preparedness are clustered as highly important, three drivers into moderately important, and two drivers into a low important group.

The analysis and insights developed in the present study would help to plan and execute a viable, resilient emergency HCSC preparedness during the emergence of any health outbreak along with the stakeholders' coordination. The results of the study offer information, rationality, constructiveness, and universality that enable the wider application of AHP-IE/Grey clustering analysis to HCSC resilience in the wake of pandemics.

Due to the rapid surge in the number of COVID-19 cases in India, the health-care supply chain (HCSC) disruptions and uncertainties have increased manifold posing severe challenges to health-care facilities and significantly hampering the functioning of the health industry. This study aims to propose a hierarchical structural model of enablers of HCSC in the COVID-19 outbreak and identifies inter-relationships among them in the health-care market.

Enablers of emergency HCSC have been identified through extensive literature review and experts’ opinions. Subsequently, total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) and cross-impact matrix-multiplication (MICMAC) analysis have been implemented to determine the hierarchical inter-relationships among enablers and classify them according to their contribution to the overall system.

The research has identified and validated 15 enablers of the emergency supply chain in health-care businesses. The study resulted in a seven-level hierarchical structural model based on enabler’s driving and dependence powers. Further, the application of MICMAC analysis resulted in the classification of enablers into four groups, namely, autonomous, dependent, linkage and independent group.

This study would help health professionals, policymakers and academia to implement the theoretical model constructed to alleviate the effect of COVID-19 by improving the HCSC performances in pandemic situations. This study has social and economic implications in terms of cost-effective and efficient delivery of care services in health emergencies.

The proposed theoretical model constructed is a new effort addressing the issues of HCSC in the COVID-19 crisis. Procedural implementation of TISM and MICMAC analysis in this study would help researchers to grasp concepts in a very lucid manner. The present study is one of the very few studies analyzing enablers in pandemic situations by implementing the TISM approach.

Inventory management systems in health-care supply chains (HCSC) have been pushed to breaking point by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unanticipated demand shocks due to stockpiling of medical supplies caused stockouts, and the stockouts triggered systematic supply chain (SC) disruptions inconceivable for risk managers working individually with limited information about the pandemic. The purpose of this paper is to respond to calls from the United Nations (UN) and World Health Organization (WHO) for coordinated global action by proposing a research agenda based on a review of current knowledge and knowledge gaps on the role of collaboration in HCSCs in maintaining optimal stock levels and reinforcing resilience against stockout disruptions during pandemics.

A systematic review was conducted, and a total of 752 articles were analyzed.

Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment practices are under-researched in the HCSC literature. Similarly, a fragmented application of extant SC collaborative risk management capabilities undermines efforts to enhance resilience against systematic disruptions from medical stockouts. The paucity of HCSC articles in humanitarian logistics and SC journals indicates a need for more research interlinking two interdependent yet critical fields in responding to pandemics.

Although based on an exhaustive search of academic articles addressing HCSCs, there is a possibility of having overlooked other studies due to search variations in language controls, differences in publication cycle time and database search engines.

The paper relies on COVID-19's uniqueness to highlight the limitations in optimization and individualistic approaches to managing medical inventory and stockout risks in HCSCs. The paper proposes a shift from a fragmented to holistic application of relevant collaboration practices and capabilities to enhance the resilience of HCSCs against stockout ripple effects during future pandemics. The study propositions and suggestion for an SC learning curve provide an interdisciplinary research agenda to trigger early preparation of a coordinated HCSC and humanitarian logistics response to future pandemics.

This paper aims to explore the drivers of sustainable healthcare supply chain (SHCSC) performance measurement through extensive literature review and experts' opinions. The drivers are then scrutinized and their priority vector is calculated to provide quality and cost-effective healthcare supply chain (HCSC) services.

The drivers of the SHCSC performance measurement are validated using the grey-Delphi technique. After validating the drivers, they are prioritized using the grey-analytic hierarchy process (G-AHP), a multi-criteria decision-making tool.

The findings of the study highlight the prioritized drivers based on the preferences given by the experts. The findings of the study highlight the most prioritized drivers of healthcare (HC) by-product management system, coordinating and facilitating green suppliers in the HCSC and green packaging of pharmaceutical as well as other essential items.

The HCSC managers should coordinate with all the stakeholders across the supply chain and involve them in the decision-making process to make products and services greener and become complicit in complying with the sustainable policy guidelines. The study highlights the strategic policy and managerial implications for implementing sustainability in the HCSC.

The validation and prioritization of the drivers of SHCSC in developing nations' contexts is the key contribution of the study. Grey-AHP enables a practical approach towards enhancing the sustainability of the HCSC and opening the doors for generalizing the study for future research works.

Healthcare supply chains (HCSCs) face severe challenges when compared to regular chains. Besides avoiding bankruptcy, they must accomplish their goal which is to save lives. Since 2019 the COVID-19 pandemic evidenced that a HCSC disruption generates disruptions to other SCs. Therefore, the objective of this paper is threefold: conduct a systematic literature review to build a HCSC operational excellence (HSCOE) definition; build a conceptual framework by mapping the antecedents of HSCOE and formulate hypotheses; test the hypotheses using a fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) combined with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) techniques to obtain empirical validation.

Given this context, this paper conducted a systematic literature review to build a HSCOE conceptual framework and used a fsQCA combined with PLS-SEM techniques to obtain empirical validation.

The paper revealed a relationship between important variables to achieve HSCOE, such as Supply chain 4.0, SC risk management, SC integration, SC resilience (antecedents) and HSCOE (consequent).

The literature contributions of this paper are as follows: validating a new scale for each of the constructs; finding evidence of the causal relationships between the latent variables; measuring how the constructs influence the HSCOE; in addition, the results address important literature gaps identified by researchers and serve as a guide to organizations that need to implement these practices. Furthermore, this study recommends that HCSC managers consider the implementation of robust initiatives concerning the latent variables presented in this work.

The study aims to envisage upon conceptualizing and developing the scales of smart health-care supply chain (HCSC) performance in the era of the fourth industrial revolution.

This study has implemented structural equation modelling to analyse the survey data. To analyse the collected data from the field investigation involving a sample size of 323, the IBM SPSS AMOS 26 software package is considered to implement exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in this study.

The measurement model of the study developed using EFA and CFA has resulted in validating 32 items out of the 42 items. Resultantly, the analysis using the above-mentioned tools and the parsimony of items to scale development makes it more susceptible to contributing significantly to the current HCSC literature.

The HC providers need to consider a holistic and systematic approach while taking into account the constructs of smart HCSC performance, specifically, the effect of HCSC responsiveness and industry 4.0 between the independent and dependent variables. The scales are validated from the perspectives of developing countries such as India, and hence, their generalizability with respect to first-world countries is practically limited.

The scales validated in this study would facilitate managers and key decision-makers to apply the various elements of HCSC practices, gauge the application of these scales and monitor the performance of health-care facilities.

This paper aims to present a systematic literature review (SLR) to investigate how supply chain risk management (SCRM) is applied to the healthcare supply chains and which improvement opportunities are being missed in this segment.

This SLR used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method to answer three research questions: (1) Which are the main gaps concerning healthcare supply chain risk management (HCSCRM)? (2) What is the definition of HCSCRM? and (3) What are the risk management techniques and approaches used in healthcare supply chains?

The authors present a complete summary of the HCSCRM body of research, investigating research strings like clinical engineering and high reliability organizations (HROs) and its relations with HCSCRM; (1) This research revealed the five pillars of HCSCRM; (2) The authors proposed a formal definition for HCSCRM considering all the literature blocks explored and (3) The authors generated a list of risks present in healthcare supply chains resulting from extensive article research.

The authors only reviewed international journal articles (published in the English language), excluding conference papers, dissertations and theses, textbooks, book chapters, unpublished articles and notes. In addition, the study did not thoroughly investigate specific countries' particularities concerning how the healthcare providers are organized.

The contribution of this article is threefold: (1) To the best of authors knowledge, there is no other SLR about HCSCRM published in the scientific literature by the time of realization of authors’ work, suggesting that is the first effort to fulfill this research gap; (2) Following the previous contribution, in this work the authors propose a first formal definition for HCSCRM and (3) The authors analyzed concepts such as clinical engineering and HROs to establish the building blocks of HCSCRM.

Ineffective management inventory of medical products such as blood and vaccines can create severe repercussions for hospitals, clinics or medical enterprises, such as surgery delays and postponements. Inventory sharing is a form of horizontal collaboration that can provide solutions to key actors of the healthcare supply chain (HSC), yet no prior study reviewed this topic.

This study conducts a systematic literature review of thirty-nine inventory-sharing studies in the context of HSCs published from 2012 until early 2022. The descriptive and thematic analyses include chronological distribution, geographical location, comparison between developed/developing regions, stakeholder and incident analysis.

Thematic analysis classified inventory sharing among five product supply chains (blood, medical supplies, medicines, vaccines and generic medical products). Benefits include shortage reduction, cost minimisation, and wastage mitigation. Barriers include (1) IT infrastructure, (2) social systems, (3) cost and (4) supply chain operations. Perishable inventory policies include Fresher-First (FF), Last-Expire-First-Out (LEFO), First-In-First-Out (FIFO) and First-Expire-First-Out (FEFO). The analysis also showed differences between developed and developing countries. The study identifies several future research opportunities that include (1) product utilisation rate, (2) cost reductions, (3) shortage mitigation and (4) waste reduction.

No prior study has systematically reviewed inventory sharing in HSCs to reveal benefits, barriers, patterns and gaps in the current literature. It makes five propositions and develops a research model to guide future research. The study concludes with theoretical and managerial implications.